The challenge
The National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) is the largest dedicated funder for heritage in the UK. Since 1994, the National Lottery has raised more than £40bn for good causes and the NLHF has distributed over £8bn of that to more than 44,000 heritage projects around the UK.
Up to 2019, NLHF had 300 staff, right across the UK, using old and antiquated desktop systems. These systems were impacting the productivity of staff across the organisation, not to mention significantly reducing confidence in the IT provision. Socitm Advisory originally conducted a User Satisfaction Survey in 2018 and reported these finding back to NLHF, with a series of recommendations and an action plan to help address these issues. We then conducted a follow-up survey in May 2020.
Fig. 1: Annual change between 2018 and 2020 surveys
The approach
Our recommendations and support were instrumental in building the business case for IT transformation, which included the adoption of a strategic partner and resulted in the organisation embarking on a transformation journey that enabled the decommissioning of old IT infrastructure and the migration of services to the Cloud.
During this time, NLHF moved the entire organisation to Office 365 and provided new integrated laptop and phone devices for all staff. This phase of the digital transformation was completed a few months before Covid-19 took hold of the UK, when all staff were immediately forced to work from home.
“The new kit we have is a Godsend, especially for working at home – and ability to contact the team and communications we get from IT are infinitely better than before, so thank you!”
Staff member, National Lottery Heritage Fund
The outcome
As a result of NLHF’s move the Cloud and roll out of Office 365, all staff were instantly able to work remotely from anywhere at all and without any disruption to their productivity. The Fund was able to continue its vital investment running the entirety of the organisation remotely and protecting the £1.1b n investment in its current projects, as well as providing emergency funding responses to the sector.
From the follow-up survey conducted in May 2020, the results illustrated a huge improvement in user satisfaction, when compared against the previous survey. There has been a complete turnaround, particularly around flexible working, quality and reliability of equipment, and trust in management. NLHF made the decision to invest in its IT service and in doing so, empowered staff to work flexibly from home, whilst being supported remotely by its dedicated IT team.
Fig. 2: User satisfaction compared to other organisations
“Socitm Advisory helped us build an invaluable view of our IT portfolio and the customer experience. This allowed us to target resources to transform IT facilities for the benefit of business users and enhance the service to customers.”
Lee Edwards, Head of digital transformation, National Lottery Heritage Fund